Informed Commenthttps://www.juancole.com
Thoughts on the Middle East, History and ReligionTue, 20 Nov 2018 00:35:56 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.5This is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site, subject to copyright and fair use.On How Everything Sam Harris Says about Islam is Wrong (1)https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/everything-harris-about.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/everything-harris-about.html#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 08:34:41 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=180175Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sam Harris’s error-ridden and bigoted “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Religion” (Norton, 2005) singles out Islam for special opprobrium. Although Harris lambastes politicians of the Religious Right for having no special knowledge or credentials, the fact is that he himself has no credentials to write such a book other than strongly held opinions (he has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience but knows no Arabic or apparently any history and seems unable to think historically or sociologically). The book is riddled with assertions that any social scientist finds laughable, and certainly that any academic expert in Islam is horrified at. (Harris goes back and forth between demanding that those he disagrees with have academic credentials and making fun of scholars with academic credentials–in other words he has to be right and get his way no matter what).

Harris stacks the deck in the beginning of his book by describing a suicide bombing by Muslim extremists. He goes on to deny that there are any truly “moderate” Muslims, arguing that the Qur’an and their faith demand of them extremism, and it is only their unfaced modernity and the blessings of secular society that dissuades most of them from acting on their scripture’s insistence on violence. I will show how risibly wrong he is on this point in a future posting. But for now, those interested in a historical evaluation of the Qur’an passages Harris misuses should consult my book,

But what if he had started his book with another episode, the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in India by a woman suicide bomber, Thenmozhi “Dhanu” Rajaratnam, of the Marxist Tamil Tigers (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [LTTE]) terrorist group? Although the Tamil Tigers sprang from middle class Sri Lankan Tamil discontents with their subordinate political position in Buddhist, Sinhalese-speaking Sri Lanka, they were a secular and not a Hindu nationalist movement. They pioneered suicide bombing and using women suicide bombers, techniques that were picked up from them by the radical Muslim fringe.

So the very initial pages of “The End of Faith” demonstrates Harris’s bad faith. The phenomenon he points to, suicide bombings by *religious* extremists, was initially developed and demonstrated not by a religious group but by a secular leftist nationalist one.

Of the 100 million or so people I estimate were wiped out by political violence in the twentieth century, the vast majority of them were killed by secular nationalists, Communists and Fascists. People of Muslim heritage probably killed 2 million or so, mainly in three episodes–the Armenian Genocide, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Afghanistan War. The genocide was committed by secular Young Turks enamored of Voltaire. The Iran-Iraq War was started by the Iraqi Baath Party, a secular Socialist party that foregrounded Arab nationalism and was founded by Christians, and which rejected a proposal to make Islam the religion of state. The Islamic Republic of Iran fought a defensive war against these secular invaders. The Afghanistan War that began in 1979 was provoked by a Communist coup and then the military occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, which pursued a dirty war of extermination and ethnic cleansing of villages that resisted the Red Army. Of the 7 guerrilla groups that tried to fight back against Soviet aggression, the majority were tribal and not religious in character.

Of course human beings can deploy religion for violent purposes, just as they can deploy any other ideology for violent purposes. But in the 20th century almost everyone killed in political violence was killed by persons of Christian and Buddhist heritage acting in the name of secular ideologies. Muslims were bit players and what killings they did carry out also were largely in the name of secular ideologies.

If we take Europe over the past 20 years, separatist, rightwing and leftist terrorist groups have carried out more actual terrorist operations than have Muslim or other religious groups in most years (2015 was a tragic exception). White supremacist terrorism in the US is a much bigger threat than any emanating from the 1% of the population that is Muslim-American, and virtually all of whom are strong American patriots.

Actual social science has found that neither personal piety among Muslims nor support for political Islam correlates with support for violence against the United States. Predictably, dislike of US foreign policy on the part of persons of all stripes, including secularists, is the strongest predictor for support for violence against the US.

All of Harris’s theses are incorrect, as in, scientifically wrong, and his work is a sort of intellectual pollution of our information system.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/everything-harris-about.html/feed0Is the Green New Deal our Civil Rights Movement? John Lewis Joinshttps://www.juancole.com/2018/11/civil-rights-movement.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/civil-rights-movement.html#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 07:35:48 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=180170Veteran Congressman and Civil Rights icon John Lewis (D-GA) has joined the Green New Deal proposed by the Sunrise Movement and endorsed by newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Here is a video of his remarks, among them that the people “have a right to know what we are breathing.”

The Green New Deal argues precisely that the Climate Crisis disproportionately punishes working people, and that therefore decarbonization is an intrinsically progressive platform.

That John Lewis, whose skull Alabama police fractured when they beat him on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, has signed onto the program suggests the increasing appeal of climate action to rights activists.

Workers will bear the brunt of the climate emergency. Working people will be harmed and displaced by the more-intense hurricanes caused by warm water in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Puerto Rico’s workers have already been hit, big time. Sea level rise will harm fishermen and harm coral and other sea life that has been right up to the present a mainstay for food production. Over time, half of marine life species will be killed by the extra acid that the oceans make when they absorb the carbon dioxide in the air. Already, millions of people around the world are being displaced by climate change and by the droughts and cyclones that it intensifies (10% to 20% of the extra intensity of these disasters today is owing to people putting more and more greenhouse gases like CO2 into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas that does not allow the heat striking the earth’s surface from the sun to radiate back into space. Instead, the heat is trapped on earth in a greenhouse effect.

Newly elected Rashid Tlaib, whose background is in public health, has spoken about environmental degredation in the Detroit area and what it has done to her constituents.

The Green New Deal is a push to have the incoming Democratic majority in the House foreground moving the US to 100% green energy, in electricity, transportation and agriculture among other sectors. Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford and his colleagues have drawn roadmaps to 100% green energy for the US and all fifty states.

It matters for the health of the planet and for the billions of human beings and more billions of animals of other species. But increasingly no social justice will be remotely possible without action on carbon and methane emissions.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/civil-rights-movement.html/feed0Shattering Europe? The Debris of Trump’s Paris Fiascohttps://www.juancole.com/2018/11/shattering-europe-debris.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/shattering-europe-debris.html#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 06:31:55 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=180166(Tomdispatch.com) – You’ve probably had your fill of the media coverage, punditry, tweets, and wisecracks surrounding President Trump’s controversial trip to Paris, officially undertaken to honor the Allied soldiers, especially the Americans, who perished in France during World War I. By now, we’re used to the president’s words and deeds prompting eye-rolling and jokes. But on this occasion, as on others, Trump’s behavior reflects deeper and dangerous political trends — ones he both exemplifies and fosters. This makes the Paris drama worth revisiting.

Getting Away From It All

Maybe it wasn’t quite a “blue wave” in the House of Representatives (though it certainly qualified as a “pink wave”). Still, the Democrats did remarkably well in this month’s congressional elections, better than in any midterms since 1974. They seem set to gain between 35 and 40 seats (a few contests remain undecided), including in places Trump carried decisively in 2016.

Of course, a House run by a Democratic majority isn’t good news for Donald Trump — and he knows it. The prospect of subpoenas demanding his tax returns and documents relating to his business deals (among other things) and the possibility of impeachment, even if not conviction in the Senate, are enough to worry a man who spends most of his time thinking about himself.

That’s why the president fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions the minute the election results became clear. He’d never forgiven Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing Robert Mueller’s investigation and was happy to replace him with a manifestly unqualified loyalist, Matt Whitaker, a “great guy” he knew well until he didn’t know him at all. Whitaker was a safe choice; his opposition to the Mueller probe was already well established. Trump’s decision to appoint him as acting attorney general may or may not be unconstitutional — leave that to the legal mavens — but the blatantly political and self-interested urge behind it was evident, and not just to liberals.

Given his burden of worries, then, Trump had good reason to regard his Paris trip, planned well in advance, as an opportunity to escape Washington and revel in the pomp and pageantry that mark presidential trips abroad. This one, however, turned out to be anything but a pleasant distraction because, once again, Donald Trump proved to be not only his own best friend, but also his own worst enemy.

A PR Debacle in Paris

No sooner had Air Force One touched down in Paris than the president in his usual fashion made news, drawing attention to his impulsiveness, his vindictiveness, and his contempt for facts. The medium — no surprise here — was his cherished political weapon, Twitter, from which he seems no more capable of separating himself than a melting-down child can from his pacifier or favorite stuffed animal. Trump on Twitter is Trump in the raw: all id, without a scintilla of superego.

On this occasion, even before Air Force One touched down in Paris, he took aim at his host, French President Emmanuel Macron, whom he accused of saying, in a radio interview, that the United States was among the threats against which Europe needed to build a “true European army.” (“President Macron of France has just suggested that Europe build its own military in order to protect itself from the U.S., China and Russia. Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of NATO, which the U.S. subsidizes greatly!”) Quelle horreur!

The president’s outburst, in classically Trumpian syntax, triggered a backlash that brings to mind a quip about 1950s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that British historian Andrew Roberts attributes to Winston Churchill: “He’s the only bull I know who takes his china closet with him.”

As it happens, Macron hadn’t painted the United States as an enemy in his actual interview. He did urge Europeans to become more independent militarily and more generally reduce their dependence on Washington. So what? Trump himself had long demanded just that. He did so even before becoming the Republican presidential nominee and has never stopped since. He complains continually that NATO states are ripping off America, devoting less of their gross domestic product to military expenditures than does the United States, while leaving it to Uncle Sam to protect them.

Reading Trump’s fiery tweet you might have believed that Macron had portrayed the U.S. as an actual military threat to Europe on par with the Russians. He did, in fact, mention the United States while discussing the threats anti-democratic movements and radical nationalism posed to the continent. He also claimed that Europe would be “the principal victim” of Trump’s recent unilateral decision to scrap the 1987 Cold War era treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF). The American president’s characterization of his comments, however, was simply false.

Nor were Macron’s observations about the United States baseless. Trump and National Security Advisor John Bolton despise multilateral institutions, including the European Union (EU). When asked during an interview with CBS Evening News this summer to list America’s “biggest foe,” the president included the EU, citing its trade policies. Ditto multilateralism. In what was widely seen in France as a snub, his schedule didn’t even include Macron’s maiden Paris Peace Forum, created to foster international cooperation on transnational issues.

As for Trump’s defenestration of the INF treaty, it does indeed threaten Europe’s security. That agreement holds the singular distinction of having eliminated an entire category of nuclear arms — about 2,700 missiles — thereby reducing the chances that the two Cold War superpowers would turn Europe into a nuclear battleground. Bolton has long opposed the treaty and his appointment probably sealed its fate. The administration withdrew from the agreement without any serious consultations with European allies, despite its obvious importance to them. Nor did Trump’s foreign policy team make serious efforts to ascertain whether negotiations might address U.S. concerns about Russia’s Novator 9M729, a new missile whose range appears to contravene the treaty’s limits.

Give the president credit for consistency, though. He again demonstrated that he doesn’t require Twitter to make waves (which often leave him drenched). Though he routinely flaunts his patriotism and reverence for the U.S. military, he failed to turn up at the Aisne–Marne American Cemetery, which contains the graves of 2,289 U.S. Marines killed while fighting five German divisions in the brutal June 1918 Battle of Belleau Wood. The White House communications staff chalked up Trump’s absence from this scheduled appearance to rain and the poor visibility that grounded Marine One, the president’s helicopter. But presidential trips always have a Plan B for just such contingencies and Aisne is only about 50 miles from Paris. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford both managed to make it by car, as did French President Macron and German Prime Minister Angela Merkel. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even paid homage to the Canadian dead at a burial site slightly more than 100 miles from the French capital, also in the rain.

In a clumsy bid to stem mounting criticism, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders invoked Trump’s bottomless regard for the convenience of Parisians. The president, she said, was loath to disrupt that city’s traffic flows with a last-minute motorcade. Trump later visited an American military cemetery near the city, but the damage was done. The criticism came fast and furious — and, adding insult to injury, largely via Twitter. Winston Churchill’s grandson called Trump a “pathetic inadequate” for failing to brave rain in order to honor fallen soldiers. Britain’s Defense Minister noted acidly that “thankfully, rain did not prevent our brave soldiers from doing their job,” while the French Army similarly mocked him. Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director under President George W. Bush, reacted to a photo of world leaders walking together without Trump in attendance with this: “WHAT (Actually, what the ****, but you know what I mean.)” And before the trip was over, it would only get worse.

NATO “Diplomacy” à la Trump

Trump’s conduct in Paris was anything but an aberration. Take his attacks on NATO allies for failing to carry more of the burden for Europe’s defense. Now, it’s certainly reasonable to suggest that the current purpose of a Cold War alliance should be rethought. It’s also proper to ask why its European members, whose combined gross domestic product (GDP), according to NATO data, is about $17 trillion (versus $19.5 trillion for the United States), can’t devote more money to their own defense. Of course, the GDP of the putative threat, Russia, is only around $1.5 trillion — less than Canada’s and slightly more than Spain’s. Just four of NATO’s 29 European members have met the two-percent-of-GDP target for military spending that the alliance agreed on years ago, and 15 allocate less than 1.5% (compared to 3.5% for the U.S.).

So, yes, what the wonks call “burden-sharing” should certainly be on the table, but that’s not all that should be there. Trump harps on military spending as a percentage of GDP while slamming NATO allies as slackers and free riders, but he never asks why American defense spending (just shy of $700 billion for 2018) needs to be as large as it is: greater than that of the next 14 countries combined. In other words, is the problem Europe’s military stinginess or America’s global profligacy? Can European military “weaknesses” be attributed solely to insufficient spending? What about a host of other things like rampant duplication in the manufacturing of major armaments? And anyway, how meaningful is a comparison between the military budgets of European states whose armed forces have a largely continental mission and the military spending of a country whose forces are basedacross the planet and involved in a host of wars and conflicts?

But such matters are of no interest to President Trump. His NATO policy, if it can even be called that, consists largely of impromptu one-liners, insults, threats, false statements, and gross inconsistencies of all kinds. Typically, in 2017, he insisted to the German newspaper Bild that NATO was “obsolete,” only to backtrack a few months later at a news conference with NATO’s secretary general standing beside him. “I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete,” he claimed, insisting that the alliance hadn’t previously fought terror and now was doing so — a thoroughly fantastical claim.

On other occasions, he’s cast doubt on whether the United States would even defend NATO states under attack, no matter the obligations in Article V of the treaty that created the alliance. This July, he added to the uncertainty by offering a scenario for just such a situation: “So let’s say Montenegro — which joined last year — is attacked. Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack? Why is that?” (Of course, his children are no more likely to be in the now-all-volunteer U.S. military than he was.)

On November 12th, hard on the heels of his Paris fiasco, he again declared, on Twitter (naturally): “It is time that these very rich countries either pay the United States for its great military protection, or protect themselves… and Trade must be FREE and FAIR!” The United States, he complained, was providing this expensive service “for the great privilege of losing hundreds of billions of dollars with these same countries on trade.” We get nothing, he added, “but Trade Deficits and Losses.” In the weird world of Trumponomics, success in trade apparently requires that the U.S. run a surplus with every country it buys from and sells to. (What if all countries took that position?)

If his true aim was to reform the NATO alliance, the last thing he’d do would be continue tweeting intemperately in the rain. If, however, you don’t care a whit about NATO or the European Union and what you actually want is to dominate the news cycle, while whipping up your base, then that’s exactly what you do. Besides, presenting U.S. support for NATO — for, that is, a set of countries that since 1945 have never said “no” to Washington on more or less anything — as a social service or an act of charity is a bit rich.

Leading NATO is one of the roles that has long enabled American leaders and the Washington foreign policy establishment to brag about being, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said, the planet’s “indispensable nation” — allowing American presidents to travel the world preening like emperors while inspecting their provinces. Europe may be the world’s second most important center of economic power, but its dependency on Washington for its security has long ensured that it would play second fiddle to the United States. Moreover, NATO is a central element in the worldwide network of military bases the United States uses for projecting its power far and wide.

As if the backlash from his initial Twitter attack on Macron didn’t faintly satisfy him, the president went at it again as soon as he returned to Washington. He promptly mocked the French president’s proposal (which German Chancellor Angela Merkel quickly endorsed) for a European military force with a sneering putdown: “Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China, and Russia. But it was Germany in World Wars One & Two — How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along. Pay for NATO or not!” Not only was the jibe tasteless, it was another instance of Trump being fact-free as Macron had never called for a European army to counter a potentially American military strike.

Besides, given Trump’s fulminations about Europeans freeriding at America’s expense, why wasn’t he happy to hear that continent’s leaders talking about becoming more militarily self-sufficient? But perhaps what the president really wants is for Europe to write Uncle Sam yearly checks, while sticking with NATO and remaining a subordinate principality whose leaders he can insult at whim.

Trump and Europe’s “Nationalist” Right

Add to all of this one more factor: President Trump’s clear sympathy for far-right, xenophobic movements (and their admiration for him), especially at a time when such extreme nationalist groups have become the biggest threat to democracy and tolerance within the European Union.

Here again, his incendiary statements have been anything but one-off gaffes; they have been systematic and, as in Paris, ongoing. While still the president-elect, he volunteered that Nigel Farage, the interim leader of the right-wing, nativist UK Independence Party who had voiced support for Trump’s presidential aspirations, would do “a great job” as British ambassador to the United States. Farage pronounced himself “very flattered” and was clearly taken by the idea, but Number 10 Downing Street, not amused, retorted tartly, “There is no vacancy. We have an excellent ambassador to the U.S.” As it happened, Trump got together with Farage before he even held his first official meeting with Prime Minister Theresa May.

And when it came to praising xenophobic European politicians, Farage was just the first European version of a Trumpian-style politician to get in line. There’s Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who’s been busily eroding his country’s democratic institutions, whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia, closing his border to refugees from war-torn countries, emitting anti-Semitic dog whistles, and posing as the protector of Hungary’s “Christian culture.” He acclaimed Trump’s America First nationalism as a death knell for multilateralism. In turn, Trump and his team have warmed to Orban. This August, Trump’s friend and recently appointed ambassador to Hungary, David Cornstein, gushed that the president admired Orban because the latter was “a very strong leader.” Trump has yet to host Orban at the White House, but the prime minister’s top officials have met with Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Then there’s the Polish government led by that country’s Law and Justice Party (PiS). Its ideology is a kissing cousin’s to Orban’s, so much so that Polish leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has praised the Hungarian prime minister as an ally in resisting the EU’s insistence on democratic governance. No matter: while visiting Poland in July 2017, Trump hailed that PiS-ruled country as a defender of Western values, despite its government’s attacks on the independence of the Polish judiciary and media. This September, one day after the EU referred Poland to the European Court of Justice for politicizing its judicial system, Trump, in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, again lauded that country for the way its people were defending “their independence, their security, and their sovereignty.”

Also noteworthy is the mutual admiration between Trump and France’s far-right National Front. In February 2017, its leader, Marine Le Pen, who would later run against Macron for the French presidency, exclaimed: “I have only reason to rejoice in Donald Trump’s actions” and Trump in turn hailed her “as the strongest candidate… strongest on borders… and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France.” She lost to Macron, but this February, her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (she later dropped the “Le Pen”), a rising star in the National Front who may become its leader someday, joined President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Nigel Farage in addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference and praised Trump’s America First narrative.

Then there’s Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right, immigrant-bashing Northern League. He dreams of a future alliance among Europe’s ultranationalist parties, as does former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Salvini met Trump in 2016, backed his quest for the presidency, and then released a photograph of both of them smiling in a thumbs-up pose and another of him holding a Trump campaign poster. This September, by then perhaps the most influential member of Italy’s new government, he offered a blanket endorsement of Trump’s policies. Steve Bannon met the Italian leader that month and, while speaking of his plan to form a trans-Europe populist alliance, reported that “we have Salvini on board.”

It’s telling that Trump favors the most anti-democratic European governments and movements, the ones that peddle bigotry, while choosing to pick fights with the leaders of Britain, Germany, and now France. It’s no less revealing that other European far-right figures find him so appealing. None of this, however, should be surprising. The narratives of Europe’s right and the president’s rhetoric overlap, as do the policies they favor.

And it never ends: the vitriolic tweets, the falsehoods, the fondness for far-right groups, the penchant for demeaning allies. It’s easy enough to take all of this as just the White House’s ongoing version of Saturday Night Live. But that would be a mistake. Behind it lurks a future in which nationalism could shatter Europe, proving hazardous for Europeans and Americans alike.

Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/shattering-europe-debris.html/feed0For First Time, Afghan President admits 30,000 Troops killed since 2015https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/afghan-president-admits.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/afghan-president-admits.html#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 06:19:12 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=180163Washington (AFP) – The death toll among Afghanistan’s security forces is nearing 30,000 since the start of 2015, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has said, a figure far higher than anything previously acknowledged.

Ghani appeared via video link this week at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, part of a university he once taught at as a professor of anthropology.

Since the start of 2015, when local police and army units succeeded NATO as bearing responsibility for Afghanistan’s security, “28,529 of our security forces have lost their lives and become martyrs for our freedom,” Ghani said.

In the same timeframe, 58 Americans have been killed, he said.

“I would like to salute the patriotism of the Afghan security forces, every single one of whom is a volunteer,” Ghani said.

“We have no conscription, nobody is forced, and if there was not a patriotic impulse I don’t think that people would sacrifice their lives for a pay of $200.”

The rate at which Afghan forces are dying has long underscored the fragility of the country’s security situation, the Taliban’s continued strength and raised questions about US claims that the Afghan troops are becoming an increasingly effective fighting force.

In 2015, an estimated 5,000 Afghan security forces were killed and another 15,000 wounded.

The toll increased in 2016 and appears to have accelerated again in 2017 and 2018, contradicting a claim by general John Nicholson, who recently retired as head of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan.

In November 2017, he said casualty rates among Afghan security forces had started to drop as the US increased the tempo of air strikes against the Taliban and as reforms kicked in.

In a recent report, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) cited the NATO mission in Kabul as saying this summer’s toll has been worse than ever for Afghan forces.

“From the period of May 1 to the most current data as of October 1, 2018, the average number of casualties the (Afghan forces) suffered is the greatest it has ever been during like periods,” SIGAR said.

Mattis this month said more than 1,000 “Afghan lads” were killed or wounded just in August and September.

More than 17 years since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the conflict grinds on and America is trying to find a way out of the war.

US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad hopes to start a peace process with the Taliban, and on Saturday he met with Ghani.

A Taliban delegation met with Khalilzad in Doha in October to discuss ending the Afghan conflict.

Featured Photo: AFP/File / WAKIL KOHSAR. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani during a press conference in Kabul this year.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/afghan-president-admits.html/feed0After Israeli Attack on Journalists Protest, Int’l Fed. of Journalists demands Responsehttps://www.juancole.com/2018/11/israeli-journalists-response.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/israeli-journalists-response.html#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 06:11:47 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=180160RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — In an open letter to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) demanded an urgent response to the unprovoked attack by Israeli forces that took place against a peaceful march organized by IFJ, at the Qalandiya checkpoint north of Jerusalem in the central occupied West Bank.

Several Palestinian and international journalists suffered severe tear-gas inhalation as Israeli forces suppressed the peaceful march, including the Head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, Nasser Abu Bakr, was directly injured with a tear-gas bomb in the shoulder.

The march was organized in support of the rights of Palestinian journalists and demanded the right to freedom of movement for Palestinian journalists.

In the letter, the IFJ leadership said, “After having held a brief press conference the IFJ’s global leadership and a number of Palestinian journalists walked peacefully a few hundred meters along the main road towards the Qalandiya checkpoint.”

IFJ continued, “At about 100 meters from this important entry point to Jerusalem the Israeli army, with no warning and no discussion, fired around 10 tear-gas bombs towards the group, injuring one of the members of the IFJ’s Executive Committee on the shoulder and causing many others to choke.”

“The IFJ urgently demands a response from the Israeli Prime Minister to this unprovoked physical assault and to these violations of freedom of expression and freedom of movement.”

“No democratic state worthy of the name can react in this way.”

IFJ also called for the Israeli authorities to recognize the International Press Card, which is recognized by 145 governments worldwide, however, not in Israel.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/israeli-journalists-response.html/feed0Trump tries to counter CIA Leak on Bin Salman complicity in Khashoggi Murderhttps://www.juancole.com/2018/11/counter-complicity-khashoggi.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/counter-complicity-khashoggi.html#respondSun, 18 Nov 2018 08:20:00 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=180157Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump attempted on Saturday to push back against his own Central Intelligence Agency’s assessment that Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and his brother Khalid (the Saudi ambassador to the US) were behind the assassination at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump called the leak of the assessment to the Washington Post “premature” and pledged a full assessment on Tuesday.

Trump said he had earlier been told that Bin Salman had no involvement in the murder. Who told him that? Then he went on and on about how great an ally Saudi Arabia has been, and about all the jobs it creates in the US by its arms purchases (the military-industrial complex is typically not labor intensive and doesn’t generate that many jobs).

It seems obvious that CIA director Gina Haspel is attempting to sabotage the bromance between, on the one hand, Bin Salman, and on the other, Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Since Khashoggi’s murder was revealed by Turkish intelligence, which obviously had a way of listening in on events in the Saudi consulate, Trump has repeatedly said that Saudi purchases of US arms, worth over a hundred billion dollars, cannot be jeopardized by one mere murder.

It is not entirely clear to me why the CIA has it in for Prince Mohammed. The agency usually does what the president tells it to do and seldom has had independent policies like this one. In the past, it has often valued authoritarian allies over principles such as human rights or democracy. But the reason could be as simple as an assessment by agency analysts that Bin Salman is such a loose canon that he is damaging US interests in the region. He roped the US into giving logistical and planning support to the ruinous Saudi war on Yemen. He kidnapped and tried to push from office the prime minister of Lebanon. He kidnapped a whole slew of other princes and held them at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh until they coughed up money (allegedly $100 bin).

Khashoggi was a US resident, had two American-born children who are US citizens, and worked during the past year as a columnist for the Washington Post. If he can be murdered with impunity, anyone can be.

Trump talked about sanctioning the lower level Saudi officials who were clearly involved in the murder and who royally screwed it up, implying that the upper echelons of the Saudi government would be left untouched.

RISING UP WITH SONALI KOLHATKAR: FEATURING JUAN COLE – Islam is the youngest of the world’s major religions – and sadly the most misunderstood especially in the West. A whopping 1.5 billion humans identify as Muslim. Yet there are political forces that have interpreted an extremist version of the religion and there are racist forces that have deemed them representative of all Muslims.

Now, a new biography of the Prophet Muhammad attempts to correct the record on a holy figure that has been maligned by Islamophobes for years.

Iraq’s President Barham Salih, on Saturday, started an official visit to neighboring Iran which aims to foster positive political and economic relations between the two countries.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani welcomed Salih and expressed openness to possible future cooperation projects. “Today, the economic relations between the two countries reach about US$12 billion [annually] and, through bilateral efforts, we can raise this figure to US$20 billion,” President Rouhani remarked in a live broadcast.

The Iraqi president’s visit comes about two weeks after the United States restored sanctions that strategically target Iran’s key oil industry as well as the country’s banking and transportation sectors.

“Washington has been trying to force Baghdad to distance itself from Tehran… It even gave a deadline of 45 days to Iraq to stop purchasing natural gas from Iran,” an Iranian PressTV report stated.

According to officials, last week Iraq came to an agreement with Iran to exchange Iraqi food items for Iranian gas and energy supplies.

Baghdad is currently seeking the approval of the United States to import gas for power stations. Officials commented that the 45-day waiver granted by the United States is insufficient, adding that the country needs more time to find an alternative source.

Iraq imports a wide range of goods from Iran including food, agricultural products, home appliances, air conditioners and spare car parts. The goods element of Iranian imports to Iraq was about US$6 billion for the 12-month period ending March 2018, which amounts to about 15 percent of Iraq’s total imports for 2017.

Featured Photo: “IRANIAN PRESIDENCY/AFP / -. Iraq’s new President Barham Salih (R) meets Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani on his official visit to Tehran.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/defying-sanctions-president.html/feed0If World Could Vote, it would Slam Illegal Israeli Occupation of Palestine… Oh Waithttps://www.juancole.com/2018/11/israeli-occupation-palestine.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/israeli-occupation-palestine.html#respondSun, 18 Nov 2018 06:55:10 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=180139WASHINGTON (Ma’an) — The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted, early Saturday, in favor of eight resolutions on Palestine and a ninth on the Syrian Golan Heights.

Palestine’s Permanent Observer to the UN Riyad Mansour said, commenting on the vote, that the votes are proof that the international community stands behind and supports the Palestinian cause despite of efforts by the United States to change that.

Mansour told Voice of Palestine radio that UNGA voted in favor of four resolutions related to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and four more on the practices of the Israeli authorities in the occupied territories.

He added that UNGA is going to vote in two weeks on six more resolutions on the Palestinian cause.

The draft resolution “Persons displaced as a result of the June 1967 and subsequent hostilities” received a recorded 155 votes in favor to 5 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, United States) and 10 abstentions (Australia, Cameroon, C te d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Palau, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Togo).

In addition, the draft resolution “Operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East” was approved by a vote of 158 in favor to 5 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, United States) and 7 abstentions (Australia, Cameroon, C te d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Palau, Rwanda, Solomon Islands).

A series of resolutions related to the report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories were approved.

Taking up the draft “Work of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories,” the General Assembly approved it by a recorded vote of 77 in favor to 8 against (Australia, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, United States) and 79 abstentions.

The draft of “Applicability of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the other occupied Arab territories,” was approved by a vote of 154 in favor to 5 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, United States) and 8 abstentions (Australia, Cameroon, C te d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Palau, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Togo).

It then approved the draft “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan” by a recorded 153 votes in favor to 5 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, United States), with 10 abstentions (Australia, Cameroon, C te d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Honduras, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Togo).

Taking up the draft “Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,” the UNGA approved it by a recorded vote of 153 in favor to 6 against (Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, United States), with 9 abstentions (Cameroon, C te d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Honduras, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Togo).

“The occupied Syrian Golan” was then approved by a vote of 151 in favor to 2 against (Israel, United States) and 14 abstentions.

UNGA called, by it terms, upon Israel to desist from changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and legal status of the occupied Syrian Golan, and in particular to desist from establishing settlements.

It also called upon Israel to desist from imposing Israeli citizenship and identity cards on Syrian citizens in the occupied Golan.